In this Newsletter:

Climate Change & Food Security

For the past two years, the world
has been experiencing what has
been termed a “food crisis” as a
combination of factors have converged
to create dramatic increases in food
price and, for some, dire food scarcities.
The results have been various:

In the United States, worries over
inflation have come to dominate the
political debate in a presidential election
year.

More than 14 countries saw rioting
and demonstrations over food prices.
In Haiti, where some were reduced
to eating mud cakes in a desperate
effort to stave off hunger, civil unrest
eventually forced the President’s resignation
and threatened to plunge the
country into anarchy.

Throughout the world, confidence in
our still immature globalized trade
system was tested as several governments
including India, Vietnam,
Egypt, and Cambodia sought to ban
or limit grain exports.

As high prices undercut the buying
power of fixed budgets, global aid
and development organizations were
forced to watch the reversal of hardwon
progress toward reducing malnutrition
and meeting Millennium
Development Goals.

The causes for the crisis are multiple;
many of them have almost
nothing to do with climate change,
including high oil prices, a weak
dollar, speculative investment, population
growth, and changing diets.

However, some factors are related to
climate change, most notably a series
of weather events (including a six
year drought in Australia, a typhoon
in Burma and flooding in America’s
Midwest) that diminished grain stocks
and led to greater price uncertainty.
While no single weather event can be
attributed to climate change, each one
of these occurrences is indicative of
the types of meteorological adversity
that should be expected to happen with
increased frequency in a global warming
scenario.

Climate change has also played
another, less direct role in the food crisis
by fueling apprehensions about the
effects of greenhouse gas emissions.
This, in turn, has helped to drive the
push for the production of more biofuels.
As energy crops compete with
foodcrops they inevitably cut into
food inventories and drive up prices.
Corn ethanol, with its especially high
input requirements, has done the
most to diminish foodstocks: one gas
tank’s worth of ethanol fuel requires
an amount of corn that could feed one
person for an entire year. Many question
the morality of using food for fuel
when other technologies are available
to satisfy the demand for energy without
contributing to global hunger.

These trends show no signs of abating,
and it seems very likely that in the
future, climate change will increasingly
diminish food security and widen
the gap between the rich and the poor.
Preventing a deepening food crisis and
lessening the potential for wider social
and geopolitical unrest will require
swift action to reduce greenhouse
gas emissions, policies to protect the
millions of people facing poverty and
hunger, and changes to agricultural
practices worldwide.

This task will be complicated by
the fact that food production is not
only a victim of climate change, but
also a culprit in its emergence. While
agriculture will be forced to adapt to
challenges involving new soil conditions,
weather patterns and water
availability scenarios, there is pressure
to find ways to mitigate its extensive
contribution to greenhouse warming.
Currently, agriculture contributes 12%
of global greenhouse gas emissions.
However, this figure does not include
greenhouse gases from deforestation
or nitrogen fertilizer production, which
are counted under ‘industry.’ Greenhouse
gas emissions from all facets of
agriculture may total closer to 25-30%
of all emissions, and this percentage
is likely to rise with an increasing
demand for food.

In order to guarantee food security,
agriculture must adapt to yield reductions
from floods, droughts and rising
temperatures, while at the same time
addressing its contributions to global
climate change.

Current agricultural practices require
large amounts of oil to produce the
chemical fertilizers necessary to grow
crops, run the factories to process grain
into packaged foods, and fuel the trucks
and airplanes to transport food across
the world. Even before adding the fuelnecessary to ship food from factory to
consumer, “the food-processing industry
in the United States uses about ten calories
of fossil-fuel energy for every calorie
of food energy it produces.” Global
nitrogen fertilizer consumption in 2005
was 90.86 million tons, the production
of which required as many tons of fossil
fuel. As oil prices increase, the cost of
maintaining industrial agriculture rises,
thereby driving food prices upward.

The consequences of agriculture’s
contribution to climate change, and of
climate change’s negative impact on
agriculture, are severe. The Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change reports
with high confidence that climate change
is increasing the number of people at
risk of hunger and predicts that between
40 million and 170 million more people
will soon be undernourished.

Climate models predict that the
impacts of climate change on agriculture
will vary by region, adding to
global inequality. Those living in high
and mid-latitudes may find that a degree
or two of warming actually improves
crop yields. Latin America’s crop and
livestock productivity will decrease,
Asia’s food security will be threatened
by alternating floods and droughts, and
sub-Saharan Africa could experience
cereal production losses of 33% by
2060. Moreover, the IPCC states that
“climate change is likely to further shift
the regional focus of food insecurity to sub-Saharan Africa. By 2080, about
75% of all people at risk of hunger are
estimated to live in this region.”

The result is a situation in which low income
regions are suffering as a result
of high-income, industrialized standards
of living that contribute to global climate
change, over which they have no
control and from which they do not benefit.
Policy makers, farmers, and consumers
alike need to consider the impact
that their decisions and diets have on
the environment. Eating locally grown
produce and less meat further reduces
the demand for resource-heavy industrialized
agriculture and livestock production,
easing the burden on food prices
and on those who devote the majority of
their paycheck to dinner. With greater
access to information about food and its
effect on climate change, we can hope
to make educated choices and prevent
future food crises.